In the era before social media, the path to fame was largely through elite gatekeepers that corralled would-be celebrities through activities like intellectual competitions, athletics, fashion and similar pursuits. The rise of reality television added a new dimension, that of outrageous behavior and attention seeking, but even this was still mediated through broadcast decency laws and the desire of networks not to push the envelope too far. In the social media era, the role of these gatekeepers has been washed away, replaced with self-service fame in which anyone can leap from obscurity to global prominence on their own volition. Yet social fame is based on virality, which in turn shares far more in common with the outrageous behavior of reality television than it does the earlier era of gatekept and stage-managed competitions. In the social era’s world of self-service fame, the more outrageous one’s behavior, the more likely one is to achieve stardom. Could this be one of the driving forces of online toxicity?
The Web has devolved from a place of intellectual enlightenment to a place of viral entertainment. The world’s intellectual elite no longer congregate into online communities to exchange the latest scientific research or share bold new ideas. While all of that may be found online today, it is no longer the Web’s primary purpose.
Today the Web is about ordinary people sharing their thoughts with the world, from what they had for breakfast to what they think of global events of which they have little knowledge and even less understanding or experience.
The gatekept era of traditional media sought to delineate entertainment from enlightenment. News programming was about sharing verified objective journalism. External experts, deeply versed in their respective fields were used to lend context and understanding to emerging events. Events were covered from many different angles and perspectives, each with its own experts and witnesses to convey those different dimensions. Commentary and entertainment were separate, relegated to their own shows and clearly distinguished from trustworthy reporting.
A critical outcome of this arrangement was that the public experienced events through the eyes of professional curated journalism, collecting together the often chaotic and contradictory responses and evidence from an event, contextualizing them through experts and weaving those stories into a final simple understandable and objective narrative.
Most importantly, this journalistic gatekeeping largely prevented wild unverified rumors, questionable evidence and uninformed conspiracy theorists from having a voice. An unusual cloud formation was not the work of Martians beginning their invasion of Earth, the moon landing was not crafted in a Hollywood studio and Bigfoot is not really roaming the quiet countryside.
The wild-eyed witness to a car accident clad in tinfoil armor and ranting that they saw from their house on the other side of the city aliens in a UFO fire their freeze ray causing the accident, did not make the evening news. Instead, witnesses who were actually at the scene of the crash were deemed more credible by virtue of having actually observed it in person and speaking of realistic scenarios.
Journalists ensured that the voices the public heard from were vetted and verified and that the experts commenting on the day’s events actually had experience in the topics they commented upon.
In contrast, today’s social media environs represent a giant free-for-all in which anyone anywhere in the world can and does comment on anything. Wild conspiracy theories are free to go viral alongside deliberately false information designed to sow discord or reap commercial profit, flooding out real information.
Most importantly, the clinical and evidence-based nature of objective reporting is incompatible with the virality of social media that emphasizes profanity-laden emotional diatribes, witty sarcasm and hyperbolic exaggeration. Objective journalism simply cannot compete with clickbait headlines and wild emotional commentary.
In short, journalism represented a supervised space in which gatekeepers carefully curated the flow of information to the public to ensure accurate objective information.
Social media represents an entirely unsupervised space in which the entire planet is crammed into a single room screaming over one another, where the loudest voice wins and there is no adult supervision.
One represents governed space, the other anarchy.
Putting this all together, could it be that the elimination of gatekeepers underlies social media’s toxicity? Without professional curation, the loudest voice wins, but the loudest voice is rarely the most informed or enlightened.
The loss of gatekeepers has devolved the public conversation from a well-ordered curated information stream focused on creating an enlightened public into a conversational anarchy with a focus on entertaining the masses.
In the end, perhaps it is this shift towards self-service fame that is most singularly responsible for the toxicity of today’s social platforms.
